Budget-cutting by the capitalist politicians has reached the point where, in many cities, government has stopped providing many vital services altogether. Unemployed and poverty stricken workers are denied relief and many thrown out of their homes and into the streets. Schools are shut down, more children crowded into fewer classrooms and deprived of books and supplies. Public transit is reduced to the point where many workers cannot get to their jobs. The right to health care isn’t guaranteed and untimely deaths occur that were preventable.

The politicians in both the Republican and Democratic parties and at every level of government keep trying to justify these attacks on the peoples’ basic economic rights by claiming that the government doesn’t have “enough money.” In fact for many years, the politicians have been using this as their excuse for gutting social services. However, the economic rights of the people are denied not because of economic scarcity, but because of politics – because the agenda of the Democrats and Republicans are to serve the interests of the capitalist class. This becomes especially evident when government at all levels continues the program of minimizing investments in social programs as it most often does, even during times of budget surplus.

And when we look at the other side of the ledger – at taxation of the workers – we get an opposite picture. On this side we see the workers bearing most of the costs, while the capitalists pay next to nothing in taxes. Over the years, the tax policy has become more and more regressive. In 1943 corporate income tax accounted for nearly 40% of government revenues while the workers’ share amounted to about 27%. But each successive administration has created new loopholes for the rich while raising the taxes paid by the working people. A major change took place with the massive “tax reform” law of the Reagan-Bush years (which was authored by the Democrats and approved by the Republicans.) This “reform” drastically cut corporate tax rates from 50% to 36% while simultaneously reducing the tax rate for wealthy individuals from 70% to 34%. Tens of millions of working people found their taxes raised while everyone was hit with several increases in social security taxes. Altogether, by the late 20th century, the working people were paying 75% of the total federal tax bill. In addition, large cuts in federal monies going to states and municipalities have continued to prod large increases in regressive local taxes.

In addition to shifting the burden of the so-called “deficit” onto the backs of the workers, the government has taken huge sums out of the public treasury in order to fatten the profits of the monopoly capitalists. During the last decade of the 20th century for example, more than $3 trillion went to the big bankers as interest on the debt; another $3 trillion went to the Pentagon arms merchants. Trillions more were given to the capitalists in the form of fat contracts, research and development grants and infrastructure investments.

Behind this anti-social agenda is the class bias of the Republican and Democratic parties. Their bi-partisan fiscal policy is to use the government’s power as a means for picking the pockets of the workers and turning our hard-earned wages over to the capitalist billion and trillionaires.

The Workers Party calls for a working class solution. Actually it would be very easy to eliminate the budget deficits, even while increasing social spending and lowering the taxes paid by the working people. All we have to do is reverse the government’s economic policy of underwriting the profits of the big corporations and insurance companies and instead make the rich pay their share of taxes. In fact, all the basic economic needs and demands of the people can easily be met the moment we Stop Paying the Rich!

Just like the question of the budget, all the economic problems facing the people – low wages and rising prices, unemployment and job insecurity, overwork and understaffing, long working hours, etc., etc. – are class questions.

Anyone who takes a minute to analyze the economic situation can immediately see that the wealth of our country and its huge economic potential can very easily provide for the economic well-being of everyone.

Indeed, the productive forces of our country are enormous. Over the decades, we have created a modern economic infrastructure, including a system of scientific agriculture which enables a tiny fraction of the population to produce an abundance of food, factories which can produce such an excess of all the necessities that large quantities remain warehoused and unsold, an instantaneous mass communications system, and advanced science and technology which enable humanity to harness the forces of nature.

Yet, in the midst of this abundance, the poor are getting poorer, and the rich, richer. The problem is that under the existing economic system, a tiny handful of trillionaire parasites own and control the economic lifelines of the whole society.

In today’s workplaces, the minds and muscles of thousands and tens of thousands of people work together and more than 100 million American workers cooperate in a social division of labor. It is this collective character of the modern production process – the common labor of the working people – which is the secret of the vast productive capacity of our country. Yet under the capitalist system, this social mechanism is set in motion with the narrowest aim. The only goal is for the capitalist owners to grab maximum profit.

As the economic crisis deepens, the contradiction between the “rights” of this exploiting minority to maximize profits and plunder the public treasury and the fundamental needs of the overwhelming majority of society is becoming more and more acute. As for the Republican and Democratic parties, since they are completely bought-and-paid-for by the monopoly corporations, their economic policies are geared, all along the line, to helping the rich maximize their profits by shifting the burden of the crisis further onto the backs of the people.

In order to challenge the “rights” of the capitalists, in order to force a change in the government’s economic policies, the workers must break the monopoly which the big capitalists exercise over our economic and political life. The first, decisive step is for the workers to come out as an independent political force, to organize their own mass Workers Party which can lead the fight to defend the interests of the people.

We Support the Palestinian Liberation Struggle!

Since 1947 and the end of British colonial rule in Palestine, the Palestinian people have been deprived of their sacred national right to an independent state. With the creation of the state of Israel, the Palestinians became a subject people within their own country and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homeland, their houses and villages razed to the ground.

The state of Israel was not only carved out of Palestinian territory but over the last 56 years has continually expanded by waging aggressive wars against the Palestinian people.

In 1967, Israel launched a full-scale war and occupied the rest of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza), again expropriating Palestinian land and forcing tens of thousands into exile.

Today, the state of Israel has not only usurped the entire historic homeland and nation of Palestine but it has also officially annexed Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. Israel has imposed military rule in the West Bank and Gaza, killing the people, expropriating more land, and establishing new colonial settlements.

Israel’s recent construction of a wall consisting of electronic fences, razor wire, trenches and concrete barriers in the West Bank will result in the cantonization of Palestinian land throughout the occupied territories.

Israel’s brutal blockade of the Gaza strip is a part the U.S.-Israeli war against the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and against any Arab government or institution that opposes U.S. dictate.

U.S. imperialism has always sponsored and relied on the state of Israel as its military outpost in the oil-rich and strategic Middle East. Over these years, the U.S. has sent more than $100 billion in economic and military aid to Israel (an estimated $15 million per day) and continues to support Israeli aggression and annexation of Palestine.

In order to win its demands for the immediate end of all U.S. aid to Israel, the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories, the dismantling of Israeli settlements, and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their area of origin, the anti-war movement must strengthen itself by taking the path of independence, the path of opposition to and struggle against both the Republicans and Democrats.

Furthermore, what is necessary to defeat the U.S. government’s war program is the organization of an on-going movement which links together the many fronts of struggle. In the course of participating in many fronts of the anti-war struggle, activists must zero in on the capitalist-imperialist system as the cause of war and exposes the current features of U.S. imperialism’s drive for world domination.

Politicizing ourselves and our movement is an essential part of revealing the real class interests behind the government’s chauvinist propaganda. It is an essential part of creating the consciousness necessary to unfold a systematic and pro-active anti-war movement and of showing what social transformations are necessary in order to realize the world of peace and friendship so ardently desired by the peoples.

Letter Denouncing the War on Iraq

In the United States, the capitalists have devoted huge resources to liquidating the movement of the American people in opposition to the U.S. war and colonization of Iraq. Why has this failed and why is it bound to continue to fail? Because the war on Iraq, like the entire so-called “war on international terrorism,” goes against everything that makes us human.

Imagine if some major nuclear power government said your country wasn’t supposed to have “weapons of mass destruction” and at the same time claimed that it did that this meant that it could launch a second war against your country. It had already launched one a decade earlier and bragged at that time about how they had bombed your country *back into the middle ages.* (And that then they had kept sanctions on your country and no fly zones and biweekly bombings in order to keep you from rebuilding so that hundreds of thousands were now regularly dying from things as minor as diarrhea and once long eradicated diseases were coming back en masse.)

Imagine that then this government decides to launch this second war. And so they come in and start dropping 500 pound bombs on bridges and hospitals in densely populated cities the size of Houston, Seattle or Boston. They pridefully call this a “shock and awe” campaign which does accurately reflect its purpose – to prepare you for the even worse atrocities which are to come after they weaken your defenses enough to invade with ground troops.

Accordingly, they then invade and remove your government and replace it with their own people, rewrite your constitution and include in your laws provisions which say that if you resist this new status quo you will automatically be labeled a “terrorist” and treated as a heinous criminal. You see this happen to your brothers and cousins and even your friend’s grandfather who is locked up and tortured in their military “prisons.” Most of your male friends are locked up because they are automatically considered “potential” criminals by virtue of their age alone. And some of your female and male relatives are locked up and/or killed because they are actively participating in trying to defend your nation’s sovereignty to which they believe your people are entitled by right. This is the experience of hundreds of thousands of families across your country.

And so this foreign, colonial power continues prosecuting all independent political organization on that exact basis and waging 15 years (and counting) of war against the people in the hopes that they can get a functional government up and running like the British were able to years ago in India. But because this is a different time and your people are not the same, your nation is not successfully subjugated to this foreign power. So the people continue to fight for freedom, independence and sovereignty anyway. A Big Lie campaign is started against your movement to claim that it is made up of sadistic demons who are really okay with the occupation but just kill people for your jollies. This is used to justify maintaining the war against you endlessly. So that even if a functional government is never set up, your people won’t be able to seize power and forbid this foreign power from accessing your vast natural resources that are worth billions in profits every month for their private companies.

The new “government” that assists this foreign power to rule imposes martial law and institutes systems to tax the people such that you cannot even get your sick family members rides to the hospital without being extorted by the ambulance service. And by now, already 2 full generations of you and your family and you and your friend’s families have known this new colonial power as your greatest oppressor.

Do you think you will ever stop demanding independence just because lies are told about who you are and soldiers are sent to kill your family because you do it? Do you think you would expect everyone in the world who has any principles whatsoever to take your side unconditionally in supporting your demand that this foreign power and its traitorous lackeys get out of your country? I would. And, in particular, I would expect the people in that other country to target their struggle against their OWN GOVERNMENT by demanding that their OWN GOVERNMENT stop ITS crimes. By demanding that it get out of the way of my nation’s free and independent path. And by insisting on holding it accountable for carrying out its criminal invasion in the first place.

Socialism

The line of the Workers Party is that social development is demanding the transition from capitalism to socialism.

Socialism alone will enable the workers to emancipate themselves by eliminating the exploitation of human beings and ushering in a new and higher stage of social development.

Socialism would eliminate private ownership of the means of production. That is, socialism recognizes the reality that the means of production are social in character – that they are the accumulated product of generations of labor and are only set in motion through a social division of labor. Thus socialism would strip the exploiting class of the privilege of ownership which historically they entrenched through force of arms and by the expropriation and disenfranchisement of the laboring classes.

Socialism would recognize, in law and in fact, that the people have sole title to the land and natural resources as well as the factories, communications systems and other implements of production.

Thus, under socialism, the working class would no longer be disenfranchised and oppressed. Labor-power would no longer be a commodity to be bought and sold with the aim of extracting maximum unpaid labor or surplus value. Rather, labor-power would be recognized not only as the necessary starting point of human and social life itself but also as one of the fundamental expressions of humanity – as the means through which human beings transform the natural and social environment so as to emancipate themselves.

Under socialism, workers must be guaranteed secure, stable livelihoods and paid according to the quality and quantity of the work done. No longer would a tiny section of society – a privileged class of capitalist owners – be allowed to accumulate wealth from the labor of others. Economic and job insecurity will become things of the past and the life of society and its members will no longer be determined by capitalist profit-making but by the struggle for social progress and the blossoming of the human personality.

By eliminating private ownership of the means of production, socialism will eliminate social classes and hence the basis of all class privilege and domination. Thus socialism would enable the American people to complete their great historical project to create a society which guarantees – in real life – equal economic, political and social rights for all human beings.

In addition to receiving wages commensurate with their work, workers would have at their disposal the entire social product.

For centuries, society has produced annual surpluses. The modern economy creates more wealth every year than the minimum required to maintain the existence of its members and reproduce society at the same level. The problem has been that this social surplus has remained at the disposal of a tiny class of exploiters, who have used it to extend their system of exploitation and domination.

Under socialism, the entire surplus would be at the disposal of society as a whole. One portion of this surplus must be invested – on the basis of a democratically worked out plan – to guarantee all the inalienable economic rights of the people. Other portions of the surplus would be utilized to create reserve funds and to invest in the future of society.

Socialism would bring the social relations of production into harmony with the productive forces and eliminate the anarchy and crises characteristic of capitalism. Social ownership would enable humanity to introduce social planning into economic life. On the basis of a scientific plan, society will set in motion the vast productive forces at its disposal and insure continuous and high rates of economic growth. Under socialism the laws of profit-making and commodity production would no longer reign supreme. Instead the economy will be guided by the line of meeting the ever-rising material and cultural needs of the people and insuring all-around social progress. By bringing the social relations of production in accord with the productive forces, socialism will create the conditions for resolving the environmental crises caused by capitalism.

At the same time, socialism will tremendously multiply the productive forces of society by releasing the human factor. Under socialism, the workers will not only receive all-around education and scientific training but will be the creators and shapers of social life. After socialism’s highest stage, the later communist society will create the conditions for the all-around emancipation of human beings, inscribing on its banner: “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

We Demand an End to All U.S. Pressure and Interference Against the Korean People

Over the last 8 years, the U.S. has exerted all-around diplomatic, political, economic, and ideological pressure aimed at forcing other countries to join it in isolating and attacking the DPRK.

In response to this campaign it is necessary to point out again and again that the real source of tension on the Korean peninsula is not the DPRK but U.S. imperialism, which continues to occupy the south with some tens of thousands of troops, and which has committed untold atrocities and crimes against the Korean people.

In 1950, U.S. imperialism launched the Korean War in order to deprive the Korean people of independence, permanently partition the country and occupy South Korea. Napalm and other chemical warfare agents were used extensively in Korea during 1950-53, and the saturation bombing of population centers throughout North Korea, the wholesale murder of civilians in the south, etc., have been repeatedly documented. It was the U.S., not North Korea, which actually used “weapons of mass destruction” against the people of the region.

During the Korean War of 1950-53, the U.S. killed 2 million Koreans in that barbarous war of aggression. 78 cities and towns in the DPRK were bombed off the map; 75% of the country’s food and irrigation systems were destroyed, etc. The U.S. used chemical and biological weapons and threatened to use nuclear weapons.

Since the end of open hostilities, the U.S. has still refused to sign a peace treaty with the DPRK and remains in a state of war. 30,000 U.S. troops occupy south Korea preventing the peaceful reunification of Korea. Through economic and financial sanctions, the U.S. is trying to strangle the DPRK. It continually carries on aerial espionage and regularly engages in “war games” to prepare for invading the country. For decades, the U.S. stockpiled thousands of nuclear warheads in south Korea and today, U.S. nuclear submarines surround the DPRK and dock in south Korean harbors. The U.S. government has branded the DPRK as part of an “axis of evil” and repeatedly called for “regime change.” The Pentagon openly boasts of plans for a nuclear first-strike against the DPRK.

Facing this encirclement, the DPRK has defended its sovereignty by strengthening its economic and political independence as well as its deterrent military power.

At the same time, the DPRK has consistently worked for a negotiated resolution of tensions. The DPRK is committed to the signing of a permanent peace treaty and mutual recognition between the U.S. and the DPRK as well as to the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. The U.S. has responded to these open and sincere efforts with new economic sanctions, more pressure and threats.

The U.S. government, in its imperialist arrogance and belligerence, is enraged at the DPRK because it is resolutely defending its sovereignty.

Since the U.S. first dropped atomic bombs on Japan, it has pursued a policy of nuclear blackmail against the world. Time and again it has threatened countries with nuclear weapons in order to force them to their knees. While the peoples of the world, including the American people, have demonstrated in their hundreds of millions against nuclear weapons, the U.S. government has continuously stockpiled more nukes. The U.S. has deployed its nuclear weapons all over the globe, helped its allies, including Great Britain and Israel, build nuclear weapons even while screaming that no other country is “allowed” to have nuclear weapons. The U.S. has repeatedly sabotaged the efforts of the international community to limit and abolish nuclear weapons. For example, the U.S. brazenly ignores the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which require the U.S. to refrain from threatening non-nuclear countries with nuclear weapons and which also demand that the U.S. dismantle its nuclear arsenal.

History shows that U.S. imperialism is not going to give up its nuclear weapons nor will it willingly restrain its aggressive ambitions. History teaches that countries can only defend their independence and their very existence from U.S. aggression by building up their self-defence capacities. This is why the DPRK’s resolute defense of its sovereignty is an important force against U.S. aggression and for peace in the world.

The American people, who ardently desire peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons, must, firstly, wage unrelenting struggles against the U.S. government and its program of militarism, nuclear blackmail and war.

We demand an end to U.S. pressure and interference against the DPRK and the withdrawal of all U.S. nuclear weapons and troops from the Korean peninsula.

We demand the total abolition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal; this is the key to global disarmament.

The most important step towards peace is ending all U.S. interference and aggression against other countries, withdrawing all U.S. troops stationed abroad and recognizing the sovereign rights of every country.

Political Crisis: What Can We Do About It?

These elections have shown once again, that millions and millions of Americans are not satisfied with more sloganeering about change, but want a real means of participation.

The problem is that NONE of the concerns and needs of the people ever even get on the agenda. And attempts are constantly being made by both parties to marginalize even people’s defense of the political and economic rights that we’ve won through struggle in the past.

Today the crisis is such that even the ABCs of politics are marginalized. Not just the knowledge that society is divided into classes and that classes organize political parties in order to fight for their interests is denied. Even the very fact that the currency of politics is public opinion is denied except in its superficial recognition by means of rigged public opinion polls. When a politician like Trump can win and have as little acceptance among the population as he has, it means that the political crisis is far past the breaking point. However, the wishful thinking of the capitalist politicians is to dream of a political system where people’s responses don’t matter and mass movements of the people can be scorned and disregarded as nothing but petty irritating noises arising from sniveling “crybabies.”

None of this is going to change unless consciousness and direction is provided to the various spontaneous struggles and on-going movements of the people with the aim of merging these many partial struggles into a generalized political movement. The people must be able to get together to bring their collective tasks to the fore and create space in which people can investigate, clarify and mobilize themselves to advance their independent political movement. The starting point of every genuine defender of democracy has to be to work to bring into political life the masses of people who are locked out and excluded by the political mechanisms set up by those who do not want us to have a genuine voice – by those who do not want us to participate.

In fact, one of the most obvious things in American political life today is that the masses of the people are fed up with the Democratic and Republican parties.

Despite all the money poured into the elections by the two party machines, less people turned out to vote this year than in the previous two elections. Out of the total population, less than 20% of people voted for Trump. Out of the population old enough to vote, less than 1/4 voted for Trump. Of all registered voters over 59% refused to vote for Trump. Furthermore, it is universally acknowledged that out of the people who voted for Trump, the vast majority did so as nothing more than a protest vote against Hillary Clinton. Hence, the so-called “mandate of the people” which the American system of representative democracy claims for its elected officials is today, thoroughly exposed as nothing more than a “mandate of the Party” which, through the privilege of nomination, exercises absolute control over who gets elected to government.

However, the workers and broad masses of the people must and will have their say. Already, post-election demonstrations are taking place across the country which reflect not only this mass rejection of capitalist politics, but also the intensity of the legitimation crisis faced by the capitalist class in the U.S.

Even while they advertise the U.S. political system as the “model” for democracy the world over, their world has fallen into a dangerous state of collapse when confronted with the cold hard fact that the masses of the American people feel alienated and excluded from the political process and the political system.

Just look at how the two parties are responding to their current legitimation crisis. They have NO solutions. All they can do is try to “demand” that people accept them when they clearly don’t. And from the moment the outcome was called, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lined up behind Trump and called on people to “give him a chance” – thus proving for the millionth time in this process, that their alleged “opposition” to his politics was nothing but competition with him over the spoils of office.

After the “votes” were counted an even more stifling atmosphere than ever was and is being promoted by the bourgeois press and capitalist politicians, both of which are spewing the most vile anti-social rhetoric. Above all, a demand is made on the people that they must recognize the elections as having established a mandate for the capitalist program of war, robbery and repression. That the people have no role to play in setting the agenda of government is treated as an unchallangeable maxim. Those refusing to give their consent to a political process from which they are locked out and excluded are blamed for not “recognizing authority” and for “lacking morality.”

Such cursing of the people is meant to cover over the depth of the political crisis.

Whenever the capitalist politicians want to launch a new initiative – whether it be a war against another country, or the buildup of the repressive apparatus of the state or turning a collective struggle of the people into an issue of “law and order” or “legitimizing” an attack on the democratic rights of the people – the people are bombarded with disinformation designed to mystify the causes of the problems facing the people and to impose a pre-set agenda on the people. In addition to the straightforward reactionary propaganda, it is always openly or tacitly assumed that the existing economic, political and social relations are the only possible way in which the society can be organized. That is, the capitalist system based on the exploitation and oppression of the people is the only way the system can be organized. The aim is to impose a straitjacket on political thought and action in order to de-politicize the people and confine the opposition to political channels harmless to the status quo.

Opportunism and revisionism also serve to worsen this stifling atmosphere. Opportunism and revisionism surrender the general and fundamental interests of the workers to the politics of the capitalist class. For example, a big part of what fueled the current crisis is Obama’s policy of carrying out governance behind closed doors. This was done because of the anti-social character of his program which was taken over intact from the Bush administration.

As in the past, liberalism, social democracy and modern revisionism never stopped telling the workers to give up the “hopeless dream” of emancipation during this time. In their view, the workers could never be anything more than a slave class which could do nothing more than be “pragmatic” and participate in political affairs by aligning themselves behind Obama who was allegedly representing a “progressive” wing of the capitalists.

Thus for the liberals and opportunists, it isn’t conceivable that the people and the class struggle are the motive force of history, but rather it must be the contradictions between competing capitalists which are decisive.

Above all, opportunism continually tries to erase the consciousness of the workers about their own role and tries to deny the class character of politics.

In fact, for quite some time, the capitalists in the U.S. have worked systematically to strengthen the objective basis for opportunism and revisionism by creating an “aristocracy of labor.” This small upper crust of the trade union movement, ensconced in the leadership of the AFL-CIO are given positions in government, the universities, etc. The capitalists have created similar bought and paid for “leaders” in the women’s movement, and the anti-war movement, etc.

Like the capitalists themselves, the labor aristocracy and opportunism negate the need for theory and try to degrade the thinking of the workers.

Amonst other things, the relentless propaganda about the “impossibility” of social emancipation aims at getting the workers to resign themselves to the “fate” of being exploited and oppressed. According to the metaphysics of the bourgeoisie, social development has come to an end and capitalism will last forever.

This “perspective” seeks to obscure the basis of every problem and in particular cover up the capitalist system as the source of the oppression and the exploitation of the people. Resurrecting Medievalism, the bourgeoisie, can only assert its arbitrary, dictatorial ideology through the power of its state and insist that anyone who denies the “virtues” of American capitalism is “unpatriotic” and “immoral.”

However, despite all attempts of the bourgeois ideologists to deny it, the fact remains that the workers are exploited by the capitalist system based on private property in the means of production and our society is divided into antagonistic social classes. While these ideologists are busily attempting “refutations” of Marxism-Leninism, the capitalists themselves have not and will not stop trying to maximize their exploitation of the workers.

Furthermore, they will never stop cursing the poor and most vulnerable even while preaching that American capitalism is “the best of all possible worlds” and that history has come to an end.

The demand of social development today is that the workers and people take the destiny of our country in their own hands. The need is to create a new political unity amongst the American people, a political unity based on a program of taking our country into the future on the high road of progress, on the road of the emancipation of the people.

The starting point of this process is to bring into political life the masses of people who are locked out and excluded from the political mechanisms set up by the capitalists and the opportunists.

In contemporary America, only a revolutionary politics – a politics which arises from the real interests of the working class and broad masses of people, a politics which unites and empowers people to fight for the profound economic and social transformations demanded by the very development of society – only such a politics can inspire and mobilize the people.

Obama Sends Head of DoD to Israel for Delivery of New U.S. Weapons

From the Anti-Imperialist News Service, December 19, 2016.

As part of U.S. imperialism's policy of ensuring that Israel maintains a “qualitative military edge” over any existing or potential adversaries, Obama sent his Secretary of Defense to Israel in a ceremonial gesture of solidarity on December 12.

The Secretary of Defense participated with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others in a formal event to mark the arrival of the first two aircraft in a series of shipments of 50 aircraft authorized under a U.S.-Israeli “memorandum of understanding” signed in September. The agreement pledged an unprecedented $38 billion in military aid to Israel over the next 10 years.

The planes to arrive on December 12 were two Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II 5th Generation fighter aircraft. In Israel the jets are known as “the mighty ones” and worldwide they are know as “the most expensive weapon in history.” The fighter aircraft are both spy planes and anti-personnel weapons which possess the capacity to be armed with 18,000 pounds of weapons.

During the ceremony, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that, “As we gather here today, the U.S.-Israel defense relationship is stronger than it’s ever been, and America’s pledge to defend Israel’s security remains unwavering. Indeed, with the current turmoil in the region we’re more committed to Israel’s security today than ever before.”

“Together” he said, “we will dominate the skies.”

Since 2001, the Pentagon spent unprecedented sums building up a vast arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, U.S. imperialism officially adopted the doctrine of “preventive war” including even the use of nuclear first-strikes against nonnuclear countries, and the U.S. proclaimed its ultimatum that every nation must accept U.S. dictates or “be treated as terrorist.” During these years, U.S. imperialism relied more heavily than ever on Israeli zionism as its military outpost in the oil-rich and strategic Middle East. In fact, even before launching its aggressive war on Afghanistan, U.S. imperialism gave Israel the green light to step up its war against the Palestinian people.

U.S. imperialism remains bent on maintaining its military and strategic domination of the region with the client state of Israel as its linchpin.

U.S. support for the aggressive state of Israel is the bipartisan program of the Democratic and Republican parties.